


I Stopped Into A Church

by PanBoleyn



Series: Between the Sand and Stone [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Necromancers, Quentin Coldwater Deserved Better, Some s5 Elements Used, Timeline Shenanigans, Working Toward A Fix-It, but my opinion of canon is very low just fyi, not season 5 compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:26:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22727614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: “How fucked up is this, you and me of all people road tripping with a piece of Quentin in a bottle?”In which Eliot and Alice actually investigate their options rather than just dumping things in a supposedly magical well, and everything changes.
Relationships: Alice Quinn & Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Between the Sand and Stone [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623388
Comments: 14
Kudos: 122





	I Stopped Into A Church

**Author's Note:**

> There is discussion of Quentin's death and speculation from Eliot on whether or not it was a suicide (it was, of course, but he can't be certain so I'm less direct about that than usual), so all warnings apply there. 
> 
> As ever, thanks to Maii for reading my draft and thanks to my writer friends and enablers. :)

Eliot’s already concluded that Margo isn’t going to help him. If he asked, maybe she would, but… Her priority is Fillory, and Josh and Fen. He’s not sure what he makes of that, but while some of what he’d said to her before was just lashing out, it’s true that he was gone for months. Things change, when that happens. So maybe she’d help him but her heart wouldn’t be in it because she has different goals.

He did consider Julia, but the truth is he’s never known her that well. He doesn’t know how far she’s willing to go, isn’t sure he can trust her.

He isn’t sure he trusts Alice either, come to that - in fact after everything, if this was about anything else he probably  _ wouldn’t  _ trust her yet. But Quentin nearly died to bring her back from being a Niffin. Before Quentin  _ did  _ die, he made sure she didn’t die too, at the Seam. And Alice loved him too. Eliot doesn’t know if Quentin getting back with Alice proves he was right to be wary back in the throne room, or if Quentin would have chosen differently if he knew there were more choices, and the truth is that it doesn’t matter. Not now. What matters is that they both love Quentin, and they are the people he risked the most for, so if anyone is likely to share Eliot’s motivation to see if there is any way to  _ get him back, _ it will be Alice Quinn.

Which is why, when he gets her alone and she tells him that she’s planning to send back to the Underworld a grain of Q’s soul that she somehow managed to temporarily turn into a twelve-year-old golem Q… Well, frankly, first his mind is a little bit blown by  _ twelve-year-old golem Q _ but once the shock of that passes, he can’t believe she just wants to get rid of it.

Eliot hasn’t sent the letter in his bag because he’s terrified of making things even worse - he’s not sure how exactly they could be worse for him personally but somehow every time any of them think it can’t get worse it does. He’s also terrified that if he does make things worse, Quentin will know that because of the letter and probably end up killing himself all over again to fix it. But this, this could be - “Why do you think that it’s hurting him? He’s,” Eliot has to swallow hard, throat going tight. “He’s dead. How can it be hurting him?” 

“Julia, she said I was disturbing the peace of his soul. It makes sense. I just took a piece, basically ripped it away from him.” 

“OK, it might make sense as a possibility, but work with me here for a second, Alice. How do you  _ know _ ?” 

“I don’t. But I can’t justify keeping it if there’s a chance that it’s hurting him, so I’m going to Fillory, to the Mountain of Ghosts. There’s a -” 

“Well to the Underworld, yeah, Rupert Chatwin was looking for it before he got kidnapped by squirrels. I know, Margo’s been making me reread the books,” Eliot cuts her off. “And, OK, fine, if it turns out that this is hurting him, we can take the soul grain there and drop it, but don’t you think we should make sure first? What if we could use it to draw out the rest of his soul instead, to save -” 

“I don’t think there’s any ‘we’ in this, Eliot. I’m laying my boyfriend’s soul to rest, and I don’t need your help. This isn’t your concern.”

_ My boyfriend. _ There is a part of Eliot that wants to lash out, that wants to say  _ you dated him for a few months and he was married to me for a lifetime _ but he keeps a tight grip on his temper. “Right, because I barely knew him,” he sneers, and OK, maybe he isn’t keeping as tight a grip as he’d intended.

“That isn’t what I meant,” Alice huffs, but Eliot doesn’t care. He’s angry, suddenly, and God it feels better than being numb. 

“No, you just think you’re the only one whose pain matters because, what, you were on again for a fucking day before he died? How long before you would have been off again, Alice, because God knows that was the only constant with you two. On again, off again, swiping at each other like bitchy little cats, but no, you’re goddamned star-crossed lovers -” 

“Oh, and us breaking up had nothing to do with you and Margo screwing him when you were all drunk? You just feel guilty and you want to tag along to make yourself feel better.” Alice hisses. Eliot rolls his eyes. 

“Sure, that explains the  _ whole run _ of problems you two had. And guilt? How about this? You screwed us all over, I ended up possessed, and Q died cleaning up the mess. You really wanna suggest this isn’t about guilt for you too, poor little magic girl?”

“I watched him die!” 

“And I dream every night of the Monster putting my hands around his throat!” 

It rattles Eliot, that he says it. He’s been insisting that he remembers nothing of his possession, to Lipson, to the mind healer she dragged in, to Margo more than once. To tell Alice any of it is… Well. Strange, and the very strangeness somehow blunts the edges of his fury, enough that he can catch his breath. “Look. You saw him die, and he died saving me, one of the last things he did was making sure you didn’t die with him, right? He spent the last year tearing himself up to save me, two years ago he did the same for you. So we’re both stuck with this shitty mix of guilt and grief and I just. After everything, don’t we owe it to him to find out if he can still be saved? Somehow? Even now?” 

Alice presses her lips together. “You could also say that after I tore away a bit of his soul because I couldn’t deal, what I owe him is to give it back so he can rest in peace. He deserves peace, after everything. He gave his life for us and that… it’s a gift, isn’t it? That he chose to do that?”

The thing is, part of Eliot wonders if that’s what really happened. If Quentin died saving him, saving everybody, because it was the right thing to do, a sacrifice he considered worth the cost, or… Or if he’d wanted to die and thought he might as well do something useful on the way out. Eliot can’t be sure, because both of those would be in character for Quentin. 

He doesn’t say that. If Alice hasn’t thought of it, that’s one bit of pain Eliot doesn’t see the need to share. Instead he says, carefully, “He does deserve peace, but he also deserves to see his twenty-seventh birthday.”  _ He deserves to know that I love him, he deserves to have the chance to know he has a choice, if he wants you or me or someone else or no one at all. I know Q, and he’d pick love over peace. _ “I think, if it  _ is  _ a gift, then we should try to see if we can give him the same thing he gave us.”

“Our lives, you mean. Except, giving him back his. But here’s the thing, Eliot. Before - I chose to become a Niffin. Quentin dragged me back against my will and I’m… I’m glad now, but do I have the right to do that to him? And you, you shot the Monster to stop him from giving himself up and he died anyway. Do we really have the right to make the call for him?” Alice doesn’t sound angry anymore either. She sounds thoughtful, and sad. “Maybe Julia had the right idea with a seance, we could ask him, then. I don’t want to drag him back from an afterlife he might prefer to this, you know? But I don’t want to hold onto this if it’s hurting him. Whatever else we might or might not do, that would be wrong.” 

Eliot can only argue with some of that. He’s willing to admit that he would be happy to drag Quentin back even from a good afterlife - he’d promise anything to get Q to come back even from that. But he can admit the idea of forcing him back is… uncomfortable, at least. As for the rest, if the soul grain can’t help them and having it is hurting Q’s ghost, then yeah, they need to give it back. But not until they know. So for now he focuses on figuring that out. “Did the spell you used say it would hurt him?” 

“No,” Alice says. “It just said the golem would stay alive as long as the caster needed. It turned out what I needed from him was… to be talked into starting to accept his death. I don’t… You know what’s funny? I cast it because I found this spell in Q’s things, but I couldn’t read it. Only, Julia pointed out that might not have been what I really needed, since Q at twelve couldn’t either and he didn’t… go, after. I couldn’t compel him to understand, but I’m starting to wonder if the spell could, in some way, make him tell me what I thought I needed to hear. So that I’d believe it was time to move on. The book was - my father acquired it somehow, it was a necromantic text and a lot of necromancy is about various ways of controlling the dead.” 

Eliot can’t answer that for her and he doesn’t try. But her mention of necromancy gives him an idea. Because who would know better how to answer Alice’s questions, the best way to contact Quentin’s ghost if that’s what they decide they need to do before acting further, than a necromancer? 

“I think at this point, the only thing we know for sure is that we need a necromancer.” 

<><><>

  
  


Margo thinks the whole thing is a terrible idea. “Eliot. Quentin is dead. You can’t do this to yourself. Please, come back to Fillory with us, don’t get caught up in this. Let Alice do whatever she thinks is best with her creepy soul bottle and come home with us.” 

_ You wanted me to talk about Quentin, you wanted me to tell you how I feel, but how can I when you say shit like that? Anyway, I thought it was your kingdom, not our kingdom, _ Eliot thinks but doesn’t say. “Josh and Fen were dead,” he says instead, voice level. 

“That’s different.” 

“How, exactly?” 

“Saving them didn’t affect anything else. If you end up using time magic to try and save Quentin, then we’re all fucked.” 

Eliot shrugs, a decent approximation of his long-gone careless Party King self. He wants to ask Margo what happened to the woman who dug up a corpse to save him and Quentin, when they’d been the ones long dead in the past and she wasn’t willing to let that stand. But he doesn’t, because he’s not sure he really wants the answer. 

Because tied into that question are more questions, like why Margo fled back to Fillory instead of staying to help Quentin and Julia with the Monster. Why she didn’t so much as check in with Quentin even knowing that he’d be as fucked up as she was. Why taking care of Josh was more important than going to the Library with her axes - they might have depossessed both him and Julia faster, maybe everything would have been different… 

Eliot doesn’t ask because he isn’t ready for those answers. Instead he says, “Who said I was using time magic? Right now we’re looking into this piece of soul.” 

Margo shakes her head. “I know you. You kept something back, as soon as it finally worked for Josh and Fen you were cooking up something. You can’t, Eliot. We will lose most of our magic, we will have a batshit Librarian on power steroids out to kill us all, possibly with the Monster riding him. Quentin - I miss him too, but he would not want us to fuck up everything he died to fix. You know that.” 

“I  _ don’t  _ know that, because I can’t  _ ask  _ him, because he’s fucking  _ dead _ , Margo,” Eliot says. “And maybe saving Fen and Josh did go off without screwing shit up, but I didn’t hear you fussing about the possibility when we were trying it. So why should I?” 

Margo is staring at him like she doesn’t know him, and Eliot almost laughs. He doesn’t always feel like he knows her either anymore. “You can’t possibly think Quentin means less to me than Josh means to you, Margo. So you do what you’ve gotta do with your wolf boy and Fen and taking down this Dark King. And I will do what I have to do to get  _ my  _ boy back.” 

Margo’s eyes flash. “He’s not yours, he got back with Alice.” 

“He’s still mine one way or another, he was even when they were in their cute honeymoon phase,” Eliot says with a confidence that he’s surprised to find is mostly genuine. Because he’s right. He’d never really lost Quentin, not to Alice, not to Arielle, not to anybody. Maybe they weren’t all they could be when circumstances allow, maybe they were friends and not lovers, but Quentin has always, always been his on some level. 

_ You have a brother of the heart with the floppy hair, _ the Great Cock had said, and it had never been in question who he meant. Eliot thinks of Jane then, what she told him about Timeline 1, how Quentin only came to Fillory to run from the pain of Eliot’s death, and how Jane’s guilt about taking advantage of that meant her first change had been to save Eliot. 

Maybe that’s why they’ve always belonged to each other in some way, maybe it’s not. Eliot doesn’t give a damn. Destiny is bullshit, after all. Having his friend back, one of his best friends, may not be all that he’d finally acknowledged wanting, but it is something. It’s a lot of something. And even having Quentin as an  _ enemy  _ would be better than a world without him.

So getting him back is the only important thing about Quentin right now. After that they can work out the details. 

<><><>

  
  


Their first stop is a townhouse in Washington D.C.

Alexandra Shepard is an old friend of Alice’s parents, apparently, and most likely the person Daniel Quinn’s necromancy text came from in the first place. Eliot takes this in with a nod, but raises his eyebrows at Alice’s last comment. “Oh, and she looks weirdly like Irene McAllister, but as far as I know they’re not related. She had a sister who was some kind of bigwig at a federal agency until she was murdered. I only know this because I overheard her asking my parents to help with a curse on whoever killed her. But just - she’s  _ not  _ a McAllister, is my point, so we’re safe talking to her.” 

Alexandra Shepard does indeed resemble Irene McAllister, but this is set off by green eyes and red hair vivid enough Eliot can’t decide if they’re natural or not. Her hair is just  _ too  _ red, her eyes too much the label ‘bottle-green’ as if they were made of colored glass. It’s unnerving. But then, he did pay enough attention in the only class he took that discussed necromancers to remember that all necromancers  _ are  _ unnerving, after a few years. Necromantic disciplines, which fall technically under either healing or naturalist because they’re not common enough to be their own grouping, have that effect. 

You can’t straddle the line between life and death for long without coming out of it looking just a little inhuman, or so they say.

Alice tells the full story of the Q golem, and Eliot draws on every bit of control learned in Indiana, learned as High King, to keep himself from being sick. A little boy who quoted Star Trek, and wanted tacos, and told Alice that her friend dying was not giving his life, but giving her back her own. A little boy who Eliot knows had already been in therapy at twelve, already dealing with the first flickers of the depression that would overtake so much of him. He knows this because Quentin told him, quiet and terrified in their bed that Teddy would inherit the same struggle - he didn’t, thank God, but the memory is still so vivid in Eliot’s mind, he can almost hear Quentin’s voice in the dark.

And both Alice and Julia had thought the right thing was to listen to that _ little boy _ and send him back. Eliot wants to  _ set the fucking world on fire. _ It’s only the genuine pain in Alice’s voice - she’s a terrible liar, if there’s one thing she and Q had in common it’s that - that helps him get a grip, that lets him believe she’d only done what she thought was the right choice for both herself and for Quentin’s soul. 

And even then, some of the knickknacks on Alexandra Shepard’s desk rattle slightly. 

“Alice, remind me, what is your discipline?” Shepard says, her eyes narrowed. “I know it’s not necromancy, but was it healing or naturalist?” 

“No, physical. Phosphoromancy. Why?” 

“Because what you did isn’t possible for you.” At the surprise that must be on both their faces, Shepard smiles. The smile is like the rest of her - just the slightest bit  _ off _ . “That spell is primarily meant to serve the same function as a zombie raising, in cases when an animator is unavailable or there’s no body. A true animator can raise a zombie with as much self-awareness as you describe this little boy having, and a necromancer of any flavor casting the spell you did can have a golem that comes out the same, if they have the juice.” 

“So, what should have happened when Alice cast?” Eliot asks when Alice doesn’t. 

“Non-animator necromancers can raise a zombie with the right rituals, and a non-necromancer can create a grain-golem, as we call this, to serve a particular purpose. But that’s all they do. They aren’t capable of independent thought, not beyond what their purpose might require. Sometimes a healer or a naturalist will get a result slightly better than that, but not as good as you did. Certainly no physical magician ever could.” 

“So I did compel little Q to say what he did,” Alice says, voice wavering a little. 

“Impossible to say for sure. But that isn’t the point. Even if you did, the grain-golem you made was  _ too complete. _ Souls in the Underworld or in the beyond that comes after it… They aren’t meant to return. They do, occasionally, especially if they are snatched back by magic before they’ve had time to settle into the other side, and when they’re brought back so fast there’s little to no effect. Brought back later… usually the consequences are physical. They tend to be weaker than they were, more prone to illnesses or similar. Death exacts a price, even when defied.” 

Alice sits forward. “But what about souls on the other side brought back for something like this? Why are you so sure I did the spell wrong?” 

Shepard shakes her head. “No, that’s not it. You did the spell perfectly. It’s only that… souls drawn back by people whose magic isn’t designed for the purpose aren’t themselves unless you’re restoring their life - and even then I would advise the assistance of a necromancer. Something about the… nature of the afterlife is incompatible with the living world, in such a way that they can’t interact properly unless they’ve been turned back into someone living.”

She pauses, her fingers running lightly over a silver picture frame. From where he sits, Eliot can just see the photo inside - Shepard herself and an older woman she closely resembles, only the other woman’s pixie cut red hair is a more natural shade. He wonders if that’s the murdered sister, he wonders what a necromancer might be tempted to do in the face of grief now that his own life is choking with it. He wonders why she didn’t bring her sister back instead of cursing her killers. Maybe the sister’s ghost said no?

What if Quentin says no?

“They lose something in a temporary transition,” Shepard continues, and Eliot refocuses on her. “This is even more marked with such a small piece as this spell uses. It’s not permanent - all we know indicates that when you meet someone on the other side they are ever as they were, but that’s on the other side.” 

“Right,” Eliot says. He’s out of patience, and he can see Alice is getting caught up in all the whys and wherefores, the academic argument. Eliot truly could not give less of a fuck about that if he tried. A part of his mind does stick on  _ They tend to be weaker than they were, more prone to illnesses or similar, _ but that can be handled, can’t it? “So, Alice did an impossible thing. Is that relevant?” 

“It’s extremely relevant, because it means one of two things. Either the spell meant only to detach a fragment of soul drew out the entire thing, and the regression to a child form was likely due to one of the objects used, or wherever your friend Quentin Coldwater’s soul resides, that place is not either part of the afterlife.”

Eliot and Alice exchange a look, and he knows they’re both thinking of a house in London, haunted by the trapped ghosts of children. No, that can’t be what’s happened, can it? Eliot remembers his own cruel words that night with a familiar twist of guilt, and a fresh wave of horror. 

“So he’s a ghost? Trapped - trapped in the Mirror Realm, maybe?” Alice asks. 

“No, that much I can tell you,” Shepard says. “Pure ghosts can’t be put into golems. No one is sure why, but it doesn’t work. I need to see the contained soul. That will tell me more.” 

Alice pulls it from her bag, and Eliot resists the urge to snatch it from the desk, to tuck it away somewhere secure and protect it. Inside that bottle is the only piece of Q left in this world, and he wants to keep it as safe as he couldn’t keep the actual Quentin. He curls his hands into fists in his lap instead and concentrates on breathing slow and careful, on letting no hint of his feelings show. 

Shepard casts over it, a spell that looks like lines traced in black smoke circling the bottle, her eyes narrowing. Eliot could swear the color of them shifts, river-green to emerald to jade to a green almost black. He could swear that for a moment her hair looks like the red of it is blood. Eliot blinks, and Alexandra Shepard looks no more otherworldly than she did at the start, her expression all intense focus as she stares at the bottle now hovering in front of her face. 

A flick of her fingers, and it’s settled on the desk again. Alice snatches it back like she’s afraid someone would steal it - but then, hadn’t Eliot considered exactly that? Oh, the symbolism, their Q would have a fucking field day with that if it was in one of his books, Eliot can just hear him now.

“Well, this is not a complete soul,” Shepard announces. “It’s just a grain of it, like you thought. But it’s… strange. It tastes of the undead, which is something very different. And it would explain the effects of the spell.” 

“Undead? Like a vampire?” Eliot asks, skeptical.

“Vampires are one form of the undead, yes, but there are many. This is… well, it’s not quite the same, but it feels not unlike a Niffin.” 

“Niffins are made of magic,” Alice says tightly. “But I do remember, when I was one, that there was… something about necromantic magic that both attracted and repelled me. As a Niffin, I was made of magic but also my consciousness. So you’re saying Niffins are like magical ghosts?” 

“You would know better than me, but no. Niffins, as far as anyone can study them, are still individuals, like vampires in fact, but they’re considered undead, because of course the human self perishes as a Niffin is born. This… it doesn’t feel exactly like a trapped Niffin, but there’s a similar spark to it. You said your friend was disintegrated in the blast that restored magic?” 

“Yes,” Alice says, jaw clenched so tight Eliot expects to hear her teeth crack.

“The Mirror Realm only makes this trickier, honestly. What you need is a specialist in the magical undead - and that is a very rare discipline, it’s almost a hybrid of necromantic magic and a little-known skillset called magic-twisting.” 

“Magic-twisters can manipulate spells themselves, as they’re being cast,” Alice says. “Or, some of them have less powerful skills like an ability to sense and track magic, or magic users, or magical creatures. Most of those are considered knowledge disciplines, sometimes psychic. Occasionally a physical variant shows up, like if someone can alter the spells on something they’re - mending.” She clears her throat. “I didn’t know there was a necromantic one.” 

“This is all fascinating magical theory,” Eliot cuts in. “So we need a necromancer who specializes in magic as much as the dead. You said it’s rare, but do you know anyone who can do it?” 

Shepard nods. “His name is Emerson Kent. He’s a detective with the London police. I’ll give him a call, tell him to expect you. Oh, you should know, that well in Fillory? It’s referenced in some of my older texts and it goes to Limbo, not the Underworld. So if you had used it, you would probably have made things worse for your friend’s soul, not helped him. If you do decide that laying him to rest is what you have to do, give me another call, I’ll be able to help.” 

Neither Eliot nor Alice has anything to say in the face of  _ that  _ little revelation. So they just take Emerson Kent’s information and go.

  
  


<><><>

  
  


Eliot remembers a long-ago day in the Cottage when Quentin had complained about the idea of doing a normal job if you knew you had magic. He hadn’t understood how people could just do that, live mundane lives after discovering magic. To Eliot it had always just been practical, but he could be brought around to the idea that certain jobs should be off-limits. 

For example. Cops are on-call all the goddamn time, so a necromancer with a super-rare specialty shouldn’t be one. Because that leads to Eliot sitting on the floor of a London hotel room, passing a bottle of truly terrible but potent vodka back and forth with Alice Quinn. 

He doesn’t remember exactly why this seemed like a good idea, but it’s not like they have anything else to do when DC Emerson Kent only spent about thirty seconds with them before getting a call and running off to a crime scene. And so, he and Alice are sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed in her room and drinking vodka. 

Well, Eliot’s had worse nights. The one where he woke up with a hole in his stomach and Margo told him Quentin was dead, for example. 

About a third of the way through the vodka, Alice fishes out the little soul bottle from her bag, holding it up to the light. Eliot closes his eyes, not wanting to be tempted to take it from her. “How fucked up is this, you and me of all people road tripping with a piece of Quentin in a bottle?” Alice says, and Eliot huffs a sound that might, in some twisted way, almost be a laugh. 

“Oh, he’d fucking love this story - dramatic, twisted little quest that it is,” Eliot says, watching the colors behind his eyelids. “Is he gonna owe us a life debt or do we owe him one that we’re paying off here, do you know how that shit works?” 

“No, Charlie was more into that than I was,” Alice says. “Maybe we can all just stop owing each other after this? I don’t know about you but I’m tired.” 

“Oh, Quinn, you have  _ no  _ idea,” Eliot drawls, and he realizes too late his accent slipped, just a little. Fuck it, who cares. “So, what, you gonna try and talk Q into a cute little apartment someplace?” They’ve taken to talking like it’s a given that they’ll get him back, when they actually mention Quentin. Maybe because now that they’ve started, the idea that they might fail, might have to lose him all over again, is too much to contemplate unless they’re forced to. 

Eliot remembers Alice offering her hand at the bonfire, and even though that moment of solidarity didn’t exactly last, maybe they are still joined by this in some terrible way. Maybe they always will be. Maybe loving and losing Quentin Coldwater is one of those things that people can’t get through without bonding, even if they’re determined to get him back. Quentin himself wouldn’t think so, but when did he ever see himself clearly anyway?

“I don’t know,” Alice’s voice cuts into his thoughts, and the sharply brittle note in her voice makes Eliot open his eyes. Alice isn’t looking at him, her eyes fixed on the bottle and her lips pressed into a thin line. “I don’t know, and I think that’s part of the problem. Do you know, he asked me out of the blue that day? Last I knew, he hardly wanted anything to do with me - literally earlier that day he jumped over the back of the couch to try and convince Margo that sending me and him to South was the wrong idea?” 

“I did not know that.” What else can Eliot say? It also has the benefit of being the truth. 

Alice laughs, a short sharp burst of sound. “Oh yeah. And even when he came back - oh, do you know about that? The timeshare spell?” 

Jesus fuck, more goddamn time magic. Eliot thinks of the letter tucked away in his bag, the one no one knows about.  _ To Quentin Coldwater, Before He Went to the Seam, _ the envelope reads, and for now at least it’s Eliot’s little secret. “No, what’s a timeshare spell?” 

And so Alice tells him about the trip to Brakebills South, her own encounter with an affectionate and horny first-year Q inhabiting the body of his older self. “And of course, he came back to himself while I’m kissing him, and the tone of his voice when he stepped back from me - God, what the fuck changed, and why didn’t I see it before? What did you  _ want  _ from me?!” 

That last is addressed to the bottle, and Eliot watches with some worry as Alice’s hand goes white-knuckled on it. “Please don’t throw that,” he says. 

“I’m not going to but - God! Sure, we had a, a moment when he told me his discipline, but I have no idea when or how his switch flipped back to wanting to be with me. It’s just that I was so happy I didn’t ask any questions and, and, and then he died in front of me after promising we’d be a team and I miss him and I’m so insanely mad at him, how could he just -  _ die?! _ Aren’t you mad at him?” 

Alice looks at him then, blue eyes wide and searching behind her glasses, and Eliot chokes on some noise deep in his throat, something between a laugh and a scream. “Of course I’m mad at him, Alice. He just - he just  _ died  _ and I never got to talk to him again. The last real conversation we had was a fight! I shot the damned Monster to save him and then he died saving me and everyone else from that thing and from Everett. I wanted to save him from sacrificing himself and I get back to find  _ he did that anyway. _ I want to get him back and then I want to fucking shake him till his teeth rattle, until he gets that he can’t just  _ leave us _ .” 

Somehow, he’s ended up holding Alice’s free hand, both of them gripping tight enough to hurt. “I don’t know how things were between you,” Alice says tightly. “I don’t know how far it went. But I always knew there was more to it - I’m not even talking about him cheating, that was… But all along, before we were together, after we were together, when I was trapped in his tattoo and I could read half his thoughts it just confirmed it. If he wasn’t looking at me he was looking at you, and I always knew that.” 

Eliot hesitates, then says carefully, “I don’t want to take away from you the fact that he did love you.” He refuses to apologize for the fact that he and Quentin loved each other, but he also knows that Quentin truly loved Alice. Even if they were a disaster of on-again, off-again, the feelings were real and denying that would be cruel. Eliot finds, a little to his own surprise, that he doesn’t want to be cruel. Aren’t they both hurting enough?

Alice shakes her head. “I know he did. I spent months living in his head. Which is how I know for sure that he loved you too. And I’m tired of being angry about that. I’ve hated you for it, I’ve hated him for it, I’ve hated myself for still caring about it, and I don’t - what’s the point now?” She sets the bottle on the floor between them. “When this is all that’s left, what’s the point? And if it doesn’t work -” 

“If it doesn’t work, we’ve got a Plan B,” Eliot says, thinking again of the letter in his bag.  _ Let the dead stay dead, _ Jane’s words echo in his head, but first of all who the fuck is she to talk, and anyway, it worked for Fen and Josh eventually. They just had to figure out the right way to do it, and it worked.

“What Plan B?” Alice asks. So Eliot tells her about visiting Jane - though not the details of the conversation - and the trial and error to save Fen and Josh, finally enlisting the Time Dwarf’s help. Then he tells her about the letter for Quentin with Jane’s last time stamp on the envelope.

“I know it’s risky,” Eliot finishes, “but didn’t you say on the plane here that Julia’s been trying to get your help with the surges getting worse? Seems to me we’re already fucked yet again, and I just keep thinking, if you guys had moved faster -” 

“No,” Alice says, “because Everett still would have shown up. I don’t know what he would have done if he found the bottles already gone. Maybe attacked and killed us all - although that would probably have killed him too so I’m not sure.” 

“OK, well, I wasn’t there and you were, so if we have to, we put our heads together and we figure out a plan of action that’s likelier to end with no one that we love dead. Maybe we’ll even prevent some of the other bullshit on the way.” 

“Not that you really care,” Alice says, raising an eyebrow. 

“I care. It’s just not the top thing on my list. That being said, I concede that time magic is risky as hell, and shouldn’t be deployed unless the necromantic consult goes tits up for us.” They’ve both ignored the vodka bottle, sitting between them with the little golden soul bottle next to it. When did Alice put that down? He didn’t see it. 

Eliot reaches for the vodka and his hand brushes the soul bottle. It - it’s warm, he hadn’t thought it would be warm. Suddenly, for all his longing to snatch it away, he can’t bear to touch it, grabbing the cool glass vodka bottle with honest relief. He remembers the Happy Place Quentins, the way they ran cool where the real Quentin was always warm, and he can’t - he can’t -

He takes a long pull of vodka, then offers the bottle to Alice. It’s not as if either of them could ever get drunk enough to actually forget, but, again, it’s also not like they have anything better to do just now. 

  
  


<><><>

  
  


Unlike Alexandra Shepard, at first glance there’s nothing that unusual about Emerson Kent. But for one thing he’s younger than she is - if Eliot had to guess he’d peg Kent at around his own age, maybe a bit older - so maybe it’s that. With him it’s subtler, something in how he moves, or how the light and shadow falls on his face. 

He lives with roommates and they share an office. It looks like they’re all magicians from the various books and equipment scattered about, and Kent confirms that when he says, “This is mostly Nia and Iona’s space - they’re the ones who actually practice as something of a job. But I spent two years studying remotely with Alex, so when she called, I could hardly say no.” 

“We appreciate that,” Eliot says with the best charm he can muster. It only makes Kent eye him warily, which means it either didn’t work or he’s suspicious of charmers. Eliot’s honestly not sure; he doesn’t feel very charming, but that doesn’t usually mean he can’t pull it off. 

They settle in mismatched chairs and, again, Alice hands over the bottle of Quentin’s soul. This time Eliot doesn’t watch, looking over at a half-formed sketch sticking out from under a book. Tall guy in a suit, the only color in the pencil drawing is a pair of blue eyes, and there’s an E.K. initialed in the corner. Eliot thinks of blue chalk on Quentin’s hands - he’d been so much better at drawing, he did most of their pre-tile laying workup sketches - and takes a deep breath. 

(He doesn’t think of Quentin sitting up at three in the morning in the Cottage, doodling on a notebook page with a cheap Bic pen, he doesn’t think of it because somehow that hurts even worse.)

Kent asks different questions, most of them about how Quentin died. It’s obvious he’s experienced at this, the questioning loved ones, but of course Eliot wasn’t even there so he has nothing to say. He wouldn’t trade places with Alice for all the world in this, he thinks as he tries not to picture the things she describes. Even for the chance to see Quentin again, he would not choose to be there to see him die.

But Alice loses her patience. “What’s the point of all this? What exactly is it that you do? Alexandra only said you dealt with the magical undead.” 

Kent shrugs, sitting back. “I can identify types of undead from the smallest trace. It’s not the whole of my connection with the undead, but it’s the part that’s relevant.” 

“That sounds… useful for a cop,” Eliot says, trying to be diplomatic. 

“Oh, it’s the complete opposite as a cop,” Kent says with a flicker of a smile. “Doesn’t do me a bit of good with normal dead, or with finding killers unless they’re some kind of undead. Or demonic. And that only happened once. It didn’t end well.”

There’s probably a story there. In another mood, maybe Eliot would even be curious. “So what can you tell us from that piece of Quentin’s soul?”

“Well, if I couldn’t feel a shade there, I’d say you had a bit of Niffin here. But since I can, that’s absolutely not what you have. This has only happened once, at least that I have on record. A case in the 1300s - you don’t care about the specifics, I can tell, but a magician was killed in a magical event, eaten alive by the magic. She was then crossed over very fast - you do know that most people are left waiting in the Underworld for a significant amount of time, right?” 

“Yes,” Alice says tightly. 

“Well, this woman, her coven had gotten their hands on their Library books. They’d used the information to save themselves, more than once. So when she died, the Underworld Branch rushed her through… and from the look on your face that sounds familiar?” Kent stops, watching Alice. 

Eliot, who knows Alice has Quentin’s book because she’d used it to get the soul grain in the first place, looks at her too. Alice is dead white, hands fisted in her lap. “We were going to banish the Monster. Originally, Quentin and Julia did it without me, and it took them two more days to prepare. The banishment worked, but the Monster worked it out at the last second and slit Q’s throat in the moment before it was sent away. I showed up to help them so that wouldn’t happen.” 

Kent nods. “Which means that when your friend died shortly afterwards, he would have been rushed through. That’s a standard policy - the Underworld Branch in particular keeps a lot of secrets, but that one they haven’t managed to hide, not from necromancers. The thing is, he caused that blast, the one that brought magic back. His magic, his blood and bone, they were in that, in the ambient. Enough of his essence to summon his soul back to it.” 

“What are you saying?” Eliot asks. 

“I’m saying he’s trapped somewhere in the ambient magic. You should be able to use this to find him,” he adds, handing the bottle back to Alice. “There’s no spell for it outright, you’ll need to jury-rig something tailored to your friend.” 

“Why?” Eliot demands. “Aren’t there spells to summon ghosts and God knows what else?” 

“Yes, but your friend is lost in all of magic. He’ll need a stronger pull than those can provide. Especially since -” 

“He could be literally anywhere magic touches,” Alice says quietly. “When I was a Niffin I saw multiple worlds. Including more of Fillory,” she adds with a glance at Eliot. “The Cozy Horse, for example. But there was so much to see and learn, and Quentin isn’t that different from me that way, he’d…” 

“He’d enjoy that, maybe even consider it a good deal as an afterlife,” Eliot agrees, because she’s right. And the Cozy Horse thing... Eliot knows that was one of Quentin’s favorite things from the books. He used to wonder if it was real. Eliot wonders if Alice ever got to tell him. “So, he could be in any world - shit, what about other timelines?” 

“It’s possible,” Alice says. “I didn’t have much interest, but I could have done it.” 

Eliot is starting to see how this might be difficult. But it’s  _ possible _ . That’s the important thing. “What do we do when we find him?” he asks Kent. “There’s - no body. Would a golem work as a permanent new body?” 

“I don’t know where we can get more living clay,” Alice says. “There’s the spell I tried to use for Penny - it didn’t work because Julia gave me her goddess magic and I wasn’t meant to use it, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work this time.” 

“Yeah, but we know we can build golems, more than one of us has successfully done so,” Eliot points out. “You’re pretty sure that the bone-knitting thing only went wrong because of the wrong magic, but you’re not certain of that, are you? And with these damn surges, isn’t it better to stick with something we know?” 

Kent clears his throat. “To answer your question, yes, a golem can be used permanently. There’s a particular version of the ritual - Alex suggested I copy it down for you. I understand that he left no body, but if you can find even something as small as a stray hair on his clothing, it will help.” Kent hands them a folded paper; Eliot takes it and tucks it into the same hidden pocket where he keeps the letter.

They have a plan now. They even have a shopping list, of sorts. Living clay, stray hairs or whatever else they can find. Alice has most of the things Quentin left at the apartment, and Eliot cast a permanent locking spell on Quentin’s room at the Cottage the morning he was discharged. No one had touched it while he was gone, and no one but Eliot can enter now. 

It’s a start. It has to be.

  
  


<><><>

  
  


After, they make their way to, of all places, the Tower of London. Apparently the London entrance to the Library is there, which is how Eliot and Alice end up sitting on a bench at Tower Green, waiting for the tour hours to be over so they can sneak around to where the entrance is, hidden by phosphoromancy. Zelda wants Alice to run the Library and as Everett’s protege she feels guilty for not seeing him as he was until it was too late; well, they can use that as leverage to gain access to the Library’s resources and find Quentin’s soul.

“They say she actually might have been a magician, and that it was a golem who was executed, not her,” Alice says, eyes fixed on the place where the tour guide is currently telling a cluster of people Anne Boleyn lost her head. Her voice is brittle, too casual - small talk doesn’t suit her, but maybe she feels, like Eliot does, that the silence may smother them both.

“Risky move,” Eliot says around a tightness in his throat, trying to match her tone. He breaths in once, twice, and then -

“Trapped in the fucking ambient. That would only happen to Quentin.” The sound choking his throat comes out as a half-sobbed laugh, and a moment later Alice is doing the same next to him, half laughing and half crying. 

“It’s good though,” Alice says, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes. “He’s more like I was than fully dead, and that means - that means - he brought me back, we can get him. We just have to find him.” 

Eliot doesn’t answer her at first, letting his eyes drift over the green grass where once upon a time queens lost their heads. He had a roommate his sophomore year of undergrad, a history major whose specialty was Tudor England. Eliot still remembers the posters of portraits of figures from the era - it felt like they were watching him on the other side of the dorm room, it had always been more than a little eerie. He can see more than one of that crowd being magicians, he figures their lives had more than enough pain for it. 

He looks sidelong at Alice, and he remembers the promise he once made to her. But there are other promises too, now. A promise sealed with rings in a life that never was, under autumn leaves and blue sky. A promise made to a memory and sealed with a kiss.

_ If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I’m braver it’s because I learned it from you. _

Bravery means honesty, and apparently in this case it means honesty with more than one person.

“You said that you knew he loved me too, but there’s something you probably don’t know,” Eliot begins, and he makes himself look at Alice, makes himself watch her eyes go sharp with suspicion. 

“What’s that?”

“During the Key Quest, you know that Margo got the Time Key before Quentin and I went off to do that ourselves. But the thing is… Q and I… I’m sure he never told you this, it was sort of an unspoken pact to never tell anyone about the Mosaic. We lived a life together, an entire life. And even though it didn’t happen to us, exactly, we somehow remembered pieces of it. These beautiful pieces. We loved each other for a really, really long time.” 

He looks away again, over across the grass, and wonders how much love is worth, when it can end like this, when it’s ended in places like this with blood spilled, when it’s ended with him and Alice both stunned with their grief, carrying a piece of Quentin in a fucking bottle that little fragment and the letter in his bag their last long-shot hopes. But it’s too late to stop feeling it, isn’t it? 

“If you remembered all that, then why was Quentin even free to ask me - why weren’t you two -” 

Eliot shakes his head. “Because when he asked to try it here, for real, I basically told him to fuck off. And by the time I - faced what I had broken that day - it was too late, because I woke up and he was dead.” He can’t quite bring himself to explain the quest inside his mind, through his worst memories. That is a secret for him, maybe one day for Margo, for Quentin if they save him. 

They have to save him. They have to.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Alice asks, and Eliot makes himself look at her again, makes himself meet her eyes. 

“I told you once that I’d never screw you over like we all did with the threesome again. But I also promised that I would be honest with Quentin if I ever had the chance. This is the best way I can think of to keep both of those promises. I’m going to tell him the truth about what I said that day, what I should have said, that I’m in love with him.” 

“You’re going to ask him to dump me and be with you.” 

“No. When we get him back…” When, always  _ when _ , it has to be, they both keep avoiding the word  _ if _ . “I’m going to tell him how I feel, and the decision will be up to him. He didn’t know before. And I’m not… I have no idea if it matters that he didn’t know, whether he’ll pick you, or me, or neither of us, or God only fucking knows. I’m not sure I care as long as he’s  _ here  _ to make that call.”

Alice takes a deep breath, folding her hands in her lap. Now she’s the one staring across the grass, or maybe at the thick stone walls of a place both palace and prison. Eliot thinks of some of the worse days at Whitespire, and thinks he has some idea of how it would have felt to live here. “We get him back first,” she finally says. “And the rest will be decided after?” 

“We can make a deal on those terms, can’t we?” Eliot asks. 

“Yeah. I think we can.” 

And so it’s decided. Now they just have to find Quentin’s soul, lost somewhere in the ambient magic set free by the blast at the Seam. And if they can’t, well. There’s always the letter. 

They are going to fix this one way or another, and that’s appropriate, isn’t it? Fixing this, when their mender isn’t here to do it for them. They have to fix it for Quentin, and that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

Visiting hours end, Eliot and Alice drifting at the back of the crowd so that at the right time they can vanish under Alice’s invisibility trick and head down to the Library. Eliot is tense, half-expecting trouble, telekinesis and battle magic both hovering at his fingertips even though he knows more subtlety is probably better even if they are caught. 

Magic is wilder now and so is he, and he doesn’t know if it’s the legacy of the Monster’s power running through his body, keeping it going without the food and rest that humans generally require, or the surges of magic since the - the blast. Or maybe it’s the grief itself, sending him spinning. Maybe it’s all three and maybe it doesn’t fucking matter anyway. What matters is that it doesn’t come to that, because Alice bends light around them and they turn the other way, going into the very depths of the Tower. 

Eliot thinks of Fillorian dungeons, and how he can’t really judge the monarchs who sent those they once loved to these stone rooms, never to leave. Hadn’t he done enough in his time? Hadn’t he locked up his best friend, hadn’t he tried to save the man he loved from a prison and ended up setting him up to die? 

“Eliot.” Alice’s sharp voice draws Eliot from his swirling thoughts, and they’re in front of a door that Alice opens with a tut that looks similar to the unlocking spells he knows, but with an unfamiliar flourish. Makes sense; most wards have customized unlocking spells. They step inside and the effect is immediate; a strange tilt to a suddenly grey-tinted world. Colors don’t vanish in the Library, but they do  _ fade _ , at least a little. 

“Alice, I thought you were already - anyway, Zelda asked me to meet you. What is he doing here?” asks a woman waiting just inside the entrance. Eliot doesn’t recognize her, but she’s staring at him like he’s - well. Like he’s a monster. 

“Sheila, this is Eliot. I’m here to take Zelda up on her offer to test things out for six months, but I want something in exchange. Eliot is here because we want the same thing,” Alice says, briskness hiding something else. Eliot doesn’t know what, can’t bring himself to really care, but the sadness in Sheila’s expression makes him think maybe she and Alice were friends once? 

“Of course. Zelda is… with another appointment, but she wanted you to join the meeting. I guess he’s welcome too,” Sheila says. 

“Gee, thanks,” Eliot comments. “But actually, i think I’ll just get -”

“No,” Alice says. “Sheila, why did you say you thought I was already here?” 

“I think I’d better let Zelda explain that,” Sheila says, looking worried, and she leads the way to Zelda’s office. 

The first thing Eliot notices, when the door opens, is a full-length mirror on the wall, only it doesn’t look like a mirror. It looks like silvery water, only with an awful red tint like blood, and Zelda is standing there, face set in grim lines -

Except that Zelda is also sitting at the desk, with two women sitting across from her. A blonde and a brunette, and Eliot thinks he recognizes them but that can’t be right because - 

“What the hell is this?” Alice snaps - in stereo, as the other blonde gets up and reveals herself to also be Alice, her hair cut shorter in a bob that goes just past her chin. And next to her, getting up as well, is  _ Margo _ , who raises her eyebrows when she sees Eliot. 

“How’d you end up getting pulled into Quinn’s Library visit?”

Eliot shrugs, all careless ease, when he really wants to scream. “I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?” 

What the  _ fuck  _ has happened now?

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Timeline 40b! 
> 
> Come chat with me on tumblr at eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com or on Twitter at @Fae_Boleyn! (FYI, I am vocally anti-s5 on Twitter so if that bothers you, stick with Tumblr.)


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